Fifth grade class combats child slavery

The kids of classroom 5B at Making Waves Academy gather around their teacher Navied Madhavian to critique each other’s performance in a mock debate. (Photo by: Sukey Lewis)

Navied Mahdavian’s fifth grade class at Making Waves Academy was in uproar. Nearly two dozen 10-year-olds clustered around a podium in front of the whiteboard, laughing, talking, jostling for a turn to write on index cards and occasionally shouting to be heard above the scrum.

“One…two…three!” Mahdavian said, bringing sudden quiet to the class. Despite his slight build and youthful face, Mahdavian’s students clearly know who’s in charge. “Remember, one at a time.”

“How would you feel if you didn’t have food, shelter, and had to live on the streets?” Asked a boy named Dwayne Taylor. Everyone waited. Another student, Sandy Morales, whispered to Dwayne to look at his card.

Mahdavian asked the class what persuasion technique Dwayne was using.

“Pathos!” The students chorused.

For the past two months, the kids in Mahdavian’s social studies class have been involved in a project to research and combat child slavery.

In his second year teaching, Mahdavian said he’d been looking for an opportunity for the class to participate in a student-directed project. When this topic came up in social studies, the kids gravitated toward it.

Student-led learning has been touted as a way to get kids to “buy-in” to their own educational experience. Though he concedes the experiment “wasn’t without flaws,” Mahdavian is pleased with the results.

Mahdavian has the flexibility to try this kind of educational technique because he works for Making Waves Academy, a charter school in Richmond, which was “founded out of concern about disparities in educational opportunity,” according to its website.

The school was established in 1989 by investment fund manager, John H. Scully, and the late Reverend Eugene Farlough, who saw the need to bring better educational options to low-income students.

“Throughout the history of the organization, our mission has been to save lives by giving our most challenged citizens an educational pathway to success,” Scully said.

To read the rest of this story from Sukey Lewis and the article that students wrote, please visit Richmond Confidential.